We introduce OvisOCR3, a 0.8B model for a broad range of OCR-related tasks. OvisOCR3 unifies document parsing, general OCR, key information extraction (KIE), document figure captioning, and cross-page table reconstruction in a single model. We train the model on real and synthetic data through continued pretraining and use domain-balanced mid-training to balance supervision across tasks with different data volumes and response lengths. Multi-teacher on-policy distillation transfers expertise from five domain-specific 4B teachers into the shared model, followed by mixed-task reinforcement learning with domain-specific rewards. We compare OvisOCR3 with general-purpose vision-language models and specialized OCR models on public and in-house benchmarks covering all five task families. In these comparisons, it achieves an overall score of 96.74 on OmniDocBench v1.6 and the highest overall scores on PureDocBench, Real5-OmniDocBench, and MDPBench. On OCRBench v2, it ranks first, scoring 65.9 and 61.3 on the English and Chinese splits, respectively. It also outperforms the baselines on OCRBench and all four KIE benchmarks. On DocFigCapBench, it achieves the highest localization F1 and a caption score close to that of Qwen3.8-Max. For cross-page tables, it leads in Relation F1 on CrossTabBench and truncated-table TEDS on MPDocBench-Parse. These results demonstrate that a compact 0.8B model can achieve strong performance across diverse OCR-related tasks. OvisOCR3 is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33066
Effective democratic deliberation is vital for civic engagement and the health of legislative institutions. However, assessing parliamentary discourse quality is traditionally done using expert-scored, theory-based codebooks (CBs), which are rigid, labor-intensive, and prone to biases. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a scalable alternative for both schema induction and discourse annotation, ensuring schema quality and mitigating models' inherent bias remains a clear challenge. In this work, we propose a complete protocol for LLM-based codebook generation and evaluation. Starting from the widely accepted discourse quality Index (DQI), we compare top-down (theory-based), bottom-up (data-driven), and hybrid approaches for generating context-adapted schemas. To evaluate these schemas, we define an extrinsic proxy measure, validated by manual annotations, alongside an intrinsic inter-model agreement (IMA) metric, which leverages differing model biases to signal overall reliability. Our experiments on 100 Israeli parliament transcripts reveal that inductive, data-driven schemas achieve higher IMA than top-down methods while maintaining validity, demonstrating their potential for reliable, large-scale analysis of political discourse.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27937
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and handwritten character recognition (HCR) in low-resource historical material collections often rely on data augmentation, yet augmentation strategies are typically evaluated almost exclusively through predictive accuracy. This leaves open whether a model's improved performance is accompanied by saliency stability. This question is important in low-resource historical HCR, where recognition is performed on variable and partially degraded letterforms and two models with similar predictive performance may differ in how consistently their saliency patterns respond to such variation. We therefore study saliency-guided augmentation as an explanation-aware strategy for low-resource HCR. Rather than treating saliency maps only as post-hoc interpretations, we use them to define augmentation variants that perturb, preserve, or constrain visually informative regions of character images. We compare classical document-style transformations, random lacunae, and several saliency-constrained lacuna variants. To evaluate the effect of augmentation beyond accuracy, we introduce the Explainability Consistency Index (ECI), a metric that quantifies the stability of saliency patterns under controlled perturbations. We find that saliency-constrained augmentation can improve recognition over classical augmentation, but no single saliency strategy is consistently best. The preferred form of the constraint varies with both architecture and corpus, indicating that saliency is better treated as a mechanism for controlling augmentation than as a fixed augmentation strategy. In some settings, saliency-constrained training improves explanation consistency even when predictive performance is similar. This shows that predictive metrics alone can obscure differences in model sensitivity under perturbation, motivating explanation consistency as a complementary evaluation dimension.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27309
Optical character recognition (OCR) remains inaccessible to many low-resource scripts because annotated document images are unavailable and synthetic training data can fail to preserve script-specific visual structure. We present a data-centric framework that builds end-to-end OCR for such scripts from only an unannotated text corpus and digital fonts, without manually annotating a single training image. A synthetic data engine renders word, line and page images with correct complex-script shaping and automatically derived labels; a YOLOv8 word detector and a convolutional recurrent recognizer trained with connectionist temporal classification learn from these images; and a stage-gate evaluation protocol isolates recognition error before detection is introduced. We demonstrate the framework on Kashmiri, a Perso-Arabic Nastaliq script with approximately 6.8 million speakers that none of six widely used OCR engines supports. Three line-level recognizers, including one transferred from Arabic, stalled between 41% and 79% character error rate (CER), motivating a word-level formulation; subsequent improvements came primarily from rendering fidelity, diacritic-preserving crop margins and tuned non-maximum suppression. The resulting system achieves 0.39% CER on held-out words, 10.0% on synthetic pages and 13.5% on browser-rendered digital pages, and establishes reference results of 18.45% on typeset book pages and 49.8% on degraded historical documents. We publicly release the trained models, the inference code and a synthetic dataset of 285,864 Kashmiri text-line images, and we describe a step-by-step procedure for building OCR for other unsupported scripts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00078
The rapid proliferation of conversational AI agents necessitates evaluation methods that assess performance across diverse dialogue scenarios, utilizing multiple situational criteria, as appropriate behavior depends on context and encompasses various aspects. Existing dialogue benchmarks typically use static natural conversations, which underrepresent rare situations---a critical safety gap, as low-probability events become frequent failures at production scale. However, limited sample sizes force a choice: either maintain natural dialogues for realism or turn to adaptive situation sampling for comprehensive yet statistically reliable coverage. We introduce SIT-Eval, an adjustable framework for evaluating situation-based conversational agents. We formalize an agent's desired behavior as situational rules: if situation is P, follow rules Q. At each conversation turn, an LLM-interlocutor enacts a uniformly sampled situation. A context-aware LLM-judge leverages all conditionally applicable rules as criteria to evaluate the agent's reply for that situation. The judge is validated using human-verified synthetic golden dialogues. Benchmarking 8 LLMs on 1292 conversation turns reveals failure modes hidden by aggregate metrics: models with similar overall scores vary widely in their adherence to individual rules. All models struggle most with ambiguity clarification and Socratic questioning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23612
Enterprise data assistants using large language models (LLMs) promise democratized data access in organizations. Yet in our real-world deployment within the CFO unit's data lake at an industry partner, we observed that business users frequently pose imperfect prompts that include domain-specific vocabulary and lack schema references or structural information. This Design Science Research study examines automatic resolution using a semantic mediation layer. We design and evaluate two design variants: schema-based mediation via semantic similarity, and knowledge graph-based mediation leveraging an automatically constructed knowledge graph from the data lake. Our simulation-based evaluation using real-world data, supported by LLM-as-a-Judge assessments and human validation, shows that knowledge graph-based mediation outperforms the schema-based approach in Precision, Recall, F1, and preserving user intent. We propose a design principle for knowledge graph-based mediation, demonstrating that structured knowledge representation bridges user intent and database structure and guides the design of enterprise data assistants across skill levels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23304
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human behavior in social science research, including decisions, interactions, and social relationships. However, in network formation tasks, existing evaluations often focus on aggregate network properties, while networks with plausible structural properties may still fail to reproduce individuals' social and political environments. Here, we generate LLM-based political networks using personas sampled from the nationally representative ANES 2020--2022 Social Media Study and use respondents' survey-reported partisan exposure as an empirical benchmark for the political environments generated for the corresponding personas. We first characterize the structural properties and political assortativity of the generated networks, and then compare ego-level partisan exposure with the survey. We find that the structure and political assortativity of the generated networks vary across experimental configurations. More importantly, when comparing generated partisan exposure with the survey, some models generate stronger separation between Democratic and Republican egos than reported in the survey, with higher same-party and lower cross-party exposure, while others mainly underestimate Republican exposure across ego groups. Moreover, networks with similar political assortativity can still generate different partisan environments around the same personas, including among networks with plausible structural properties. Finally, generated networks show group-specific errors, under- or overestimating exposure to either Democrats or Republicans for specific social groups. These findings show that evaluating LLM-based social simulations only through aggregate outcomes can hide errors in the local environments through which those outcomes emerge, highlighting the importance of validation at both aggregate and individual levels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23199
Reinforcement learning improves diffusion models using rewards on generated images, but repeated denoising and gradient estimation make training expensive. We introduce \method, an efficient method that constructs useful update directions by regressing centered rewards on centered final denoised images. It requires neither reward derivatives nor adjoint backpropagation through the sampling trajectory. A unified first-variation formulation identifies the value-gradient target with or without a trajectory-KL penalty. A population analysis under Gaussian noising explains the regression geometry, while a subspace analysis motivates clean-image coordinates. The implementation adapts rollout bandwidth and query weights to reward continuity: local rollouts suit smooth rewards, whereas broader groups provide informative contrasts for discrete rewards. Trained jointly on five rewards, one SD3.5-Medium model matches or exceeds DiffusionNFT's joint model on seven of eight metrics, reaching GenEval $0.94$, OCR $0.92$, and PickScore $23.82$ at about one fifth of its estimated training compute. In single-reward training, \method reaches matched reward thresholds $2.1$--$6.7\times$ faster than reproduced DiffusionNFT on identical hardware. Ablations support the clean-image estimator, direct direction transfer, and reward-dependent rollout choices. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22973
Distinguishing visually similar characters is a persistent challenge for optical character recognition (OCR) systems, causing errors in critical applications of text digitization. While preprocessing techniques improve image quality and word-level post-processing corrects spelling errors, neither addresses character-level visual ambiguity, an intrinsic property of certain character pairs that limits even state-of-the-art OCR models. We present the Character Verification Model (CVM), a character-level post-processing framework that verifies and corrects ambiguous characters in OCR outputs using specialized binary classifiers trained on visually confusable pairs such as 'O'/'0', 'Z'/'2', and 'S'/'5'. CVM operates independently of dictionary validation, making it suitable for non-lexical data including serial numbers, alphanumeric codes, and license plates. Experiments on three OCR engines (Tesseract, EasyOCR, TrOCR) and ten fonts with low to high complexity demonstrate accuracy improvements of 3.95-14.81 percentage points, with an 87.3% correction rate for visually similar character errors and a false-correction rate of only 2.3%. The modular architecture integrates with existing OCR pipelines without modification to underlying recognition models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22726
Misinformation harms public health and democracy, and generative artificial intelligence now writes falsehoods as persuasive as people's. Defences range from fact-checking individual claims to training people to resist falsehoods. Yet many claims are too new to check, and interventions that teach doubt can reduce belief in truth too. We propose a defence that targets not the facts of each claim but the persuasion strategies that recur across them. Here we show that learning misinformation's persuasion playbook, mapped from 214,646 fact-checked claims in 51 languages, can sharpen human and machine judgement of claims they know little about, without making either more cynical about true claims. The playbook spans social influence, information manipulation and emotional appeals, combined around a core of fear, conspiracy and fabrication. Briefed with it, plus a reminder that persuasion is not proof of falsehood, a language model better distinguished true from machine-generated false claims about events after its training data. In a pre-registered experiment, the same briefing improved people's discernment of claims they reported as unfamiliar and left their belief in true claims unchanged. Averaged over all claims, the gain was not statistically significant. Because it targets what recurs, this defence need not wait for claim-specific fact-checks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22724
Disagreement between political opponents is a central element of democracy. This disagreement can be voiced in different ways. An opponent can be antagonized, i.e. portrayed as an enemy that needs to be overcome, or they can be criticized, i.e. treated as a legitimate adversary with whom one can engage. While the latter is a fundamental part of democratic exchange, the former can be detrimental to public discourse. Political disagreement increasingly takes place on social media, where negativity towards political out-groups has been found to drive engagement. However, existing research has largely treated such negativity as a single dimension, leaving open whether it is antagonization or criticism that circulates on these platforms. This work addresses this gap by introducing a computational approach to detect these two types of rhetoric in text and identify its targets. On a corpus of over 17 million tweets from trending topics in the German Twittersphere, the method reveals that about a third of all tweets contain antagonizing rhetoric. Comparing tweets from trending topics to a random sample shows that the discourse in trending topics is systematically more antagonizing than ordinary Twitter communication. Combining antagonization detection with a large-scale estimation of users' political leaning, we find that right-leaning users employ antagonizing rhetoric significantly more than their left-leaning counterparts. Furthermore, both forms of oppositional rhetoric are strongly amplified within political camps, with multipliers retweeting them up to twice as often as tweets without oppositional rhetoric. Finally, patterns of antagonized targets reveal how different political camps construct their out-groups, with the right-wing populist party AfD and the Green party as the central antagonists of the opposing camps.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22455
Detailed captions transfer visual information into vision-language model supervision, but quality is easily conflated with length: long single-pass outputs still miss small objects, text, and spatial relations or promote uncertain observations into confident claims. We formulate fine-grained captioning as recoverable visual information transfer, in which a teacher acquires missing evidence under a finite observation budget and converts it into reusable supervision. ZoomCap uses a draft caption to route conditional knowledge retrieval, OCR-sensitive reading, coverage-gap recovery, and adaptive visual zooming, allocating deeper crops only to the most complex eligible region, deriving spatial relations from grounded geometry, and fusing non-duplicate evidence. We also introduce FactCycle, which scores caption-derived atomic claims on two blind anchors--source image (truthfulness) and reconstruction (realizability)--separating fabrication from generator loss claim by claim; human and multi-judge comparisons complement this fact-level view. Against Qwen3.5-397B-A17B captions, ZoomCap achieves an 81.9% human tie-adjusted preference score with a teacher over 10x smaller, and FactCycle counts 52.4 transferred claims per image vs. 31.5 for ScaleCap. The evidence also transfers: in continual pre-training, ZoomCap-450K improves the 11-benchmark average by 1.31-2.38 points over the strongest competing corpus and Ling-Tiny-VL-v3 gains 1.4 points on a production document/OCR monitor suite (1.5 on perception) at 60B tokens; in medical pre-training, 2.64M ZoomCap-captioned images improve five VQA benchmarks by 3.04 points (vs. 1.76 for same-image Gemini-3.1-Pro captions).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21320
Multimodal document retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has focused largely on retrieval, yet its answers depend on how well a vision-language model reads the retrieved pages. We find that evidence in retrieved pages remains underused even when the correct pages are retrieved. On SciEGQA oracle pages, five prior methods give the generator 0.7K to 2.7K visual tokens per query on average under a common image processor, yet raising the page-only budget from 1K to 32K improves accuracy by 15.22 points. At a fixed 16K budget, adding ground-truth crops improves accuracy by 3.75 points over page-only input. We study what the generator needs from retrieved pages through two requirements: Loud, making full use of visual token capacity, and Clear, refining the page so that its evidence becomes prominent. For Loud, increasing either the visual token budget or visual fidelity, the image resolution those tokens preserve, improves accuracy with the other held fixed, and full-page scaling outperforms repetition and tiling at matched budgets. For Clear, suppressing surrounding content improves accuracy without enlarging selected regions, and adding OCR of these regions to page images outperforms either input alone. We implement both as Loud and Clear (LoC), which combines higher-resolution pages with OCR from query-relevant regions without ground-truth annotations or additional training. LoC outperforms eight prior methods on SciEGQA, ViDoRe-v3, and MMLongBench-Doc, improving over the strongest, ColQwen3, by 8.88, 3.09, and 4.22 points with the same retriever and generator. It also outperforms its page-only variant under the same visual token budget. These results locate a bottleneck beyond retrieval: how the retrieved pages are given to the generator.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21318
To show that a medical device complies with regulation, experts judge whether documents and records meet each requirement and record the judgment for others to verify. For each assessment item that experts define, large language models could prepare a preliminary assessment: a label such as Satisfied or Not satisfied, a reason and quoted evidence. We sent fourteen commercial deployments of such models (seven models from three providers, through six routes) the same request repeatedly, with the deterministic sampling settings each accepted; every deployment returned differing assessments for at least one request, and in twelve the label changed. Reducing reasoning where the interface allows it did not reduce the variation, and prompts of retrieved passages removed it only for the smallest models. The same open-weight model was reproducible or not depending only on how it was served. A pipeline we built to be deterministic at every stage -- text extraction and optical character recognition (OCR), chunking, embedding, indexing, retrieval and inference -- returned byte-identical output at each stage across reruns, interruptions, edits, machines of one graphics processing unit (GPU) model and days, for blood glucose meter and infusion pump documents. OCR, embedding and approximate retrieval varied when their own serving was not made invariant, and outputs changed with the GPU model and with the inference engine's scheduling settings, which therefore belong in the recorded configuration. End-to-end determinism is achievable and gives a testable basis for audit and change control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21300
Character Error Rate (CER), the standard metric for OCR and vision-language models (VLMs), charges a typo as much as a wrong name. We introduce semCER, which keeps CER's alignment and denominator and charges each grapheme edit a severity from an LLM judge, with no word segmentation. Normalized CER keeps the score of a whole transcription, where it tracks readers as well as semCER or better, and semCER breaks that score down into named edits. The charges track readers' ratings edit by edit in English, Vietnamese, and Chinese and put the edits readers rate most severe near the top of a sorted list. On pairs drawn where CER and semCER disagreed, readers side with semCER more often than with normalized CER in English and Chinese, and equally often in Vietnamese. Across 16 languages, the judge charges a wrong diacritic or tone mark almost nothing in Spanish but nearly a wrong letter's severity in Telugu. Where we can count real words, a general VLM's wrong letter forms one far above chance while a classical pipeline's stays near it. We release the 61 million judged edits, the aggregated reader ratings, and the distilled scorer at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20461
Enabling the reuse and composition of knowledge and capabilities distributed across foundation models is an important step toward building scalable artificial intelligence (AI) systems. However, architectural differences and incompatible representations make it difficult to transfer and integrate these capabilities through a unified cross-model interface. To address this challenge, we propose SuperAI, a cross-architecture multi-model fusion framework that integrates complementary capabilities from multiple source models into a host model through orthogonal alignment of low-dimensional task-relevant representations. Specifically, we first extract task-relevant representations from the source models and the host model using shared anchor samples, and apply principal component analysis (PCA) to construct low-dimensional functional subspaces with the same dimensionality. Next, we use orthogonal Procrustes mappings to align the source and host coordinate systems, establishing cross-model correspondences while preserving the internal geometry of each source subspace. Finally, we train a lightweight residual multilayer perceptron (MLP) with joint supervision on task outputs and source-model increments, learning input-dependent residual increments that are injected into the host model for multi-model capability fusion. Experiments on three host models across 15 capability domains show that SuperAI achieves higher average domain scores than the evaluated cross-architecture fusion methods and better preserves general capabilities as the number of source models increases. Ablation studies further support the effectiveness of orthogonal alignment, nonlinear residual mapping, and joint supervision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15322
Text-to-image models increasingly generate readable Chinese text that still contains local rendering defects, such as a character with an extra or missing stroke or a malformed component. Such errors are invisible to OCR and vision-language models, which are trained for recognition and are therefore invariant to the very structural deviations that define a rendering error. We formalize text rendering verification as a target-conditioned problem: given a target character and an image crop, decide whether the crop is a correct rendering of that character. Our verifier TEXTVERIFIER feeds the text tower a character's Ideographic Description Sequence (IDS) rather than a single-character symbol, and is trained on 12.7M crop-IDS pairs plus label-free "same-character, different-quality" hard pairs sampled from the training trajectory of a text-region inpainting model. To evaluate this ability we build TEXTRENDERBENCH-ZH, the first per-character benchmark for generated Chinese text, annotating position, identity, and correctness for 7,358 characters. TEXTVERIFIER reaches an F1 of 0.844, far above OCR confidence (0.526), a general VLM (0.329), and TextPecker (0.590). Used as a per-character reward for Flow-GRPO post-training, it further reduces rendering errors, showing that its score can both detect and correct errors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19551
Vision-language models (VLMs) have been widely adopted for document parsing and optical character recognition (OCR), as they can accurately extract page-level elements. However, downstream applications such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) also require coherent document-level structure. Although these models indicate heading levels using different numbers of preceding ``\#'' symbols, page-by-page prediction often lacks document-level consistency. In practice, input-resolution and context-length constraints make it infeasible for a VLM to jointly process all page images in documents containing tens or hundreds of pages. To address this limitation, we propose a VLM-based framework that incrementally reconstructs heading hierarchies with a \emph{level-wise multimodal memory}. The memory retains a compact subset of all previously processed pages, selected by anchors. Our framework supports flexible anchor selection, and in this work we select the most recent node at each level, allowing the VLM to observe the visual, textual, and layout patterns of headings at every level. For comprehensive evaluation, we also introduce the Complex and Long Document Heading Hierarchy Reconstruction Benchmark (CLDoc-HHRBench), comprising 250 documents and 11,212 pages with expert-verified annotations. Experiments on CLDoc-HHRBench and three existing benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18238
Agent Skills improve LLM agents by making task knowledge reusable across sessions. Learning transferable Skills requires evidence about a procedure and its conditions of use, which a successful task attempt can leave untested. We introduce Socratic Skill Learning (SSL), which interleaves expert teaching with Student practice. An Educator guides investigation while the Student remains the sole environment operator and Skill author, able to question, test, and adapt advice. To test reuse beyond the learning task, we construct SkillTransferBench, with 35 task families and 408 executable cases, pairing public variation specifications with held-out evaluation in fresh solver sessions. On the main 22-family, 155-case cohort, Fixed-Window SSL reaches 0.801 utility, versus 0.723 without a Skill, 0.761 for adapted Trace2Skill (trajectory distillation), and 0.751 for adapted SKILL-KD (contrastive distillation). Across three model pairs on shared families, interleaved guidance outperforms expert authoring and post-hoc teaching. Process analysis links guidance to Student writing and package revision; a case study shows the Student testing and refining a proposed procedure for later reuse. As demand for new lessons falls, the cost of fixed-window review grows. Issue-Guided SSL tracks unresolved questions across Skill revisions to select and focus review, reaching 0.805 utility with 61.7% fewer Educator tokens and 16.9% fewer total acquisition tokens than Fixed-Window SSL on the main cohort.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17860
Evaluating the quality of process models discovered from event logs is a fundamental challenge in process mining. Traditional evaluation relies on conformance metrics such as fitness and precision, which are highly sensitive to noise and deviations in event logs and therefore often fail to give a consistent assessment of discovery algorithms. We introduce a model-centric evaluation framework that combines node embeddings with Procrustes alignment to enable cross-graph comparability, since embeddings derived from different graphs reside in distinct vector spaces. The proposed PetriNetGraph method transforms Petri net process models into graph representations compatible with embedding algorithms. Comparing the node embeddings of ground-truth and discovered models through a parameterized cosine distance yields a unified and bounded metric for evaluating process discovery across datasets and methods. We evaluate the framework under static and context-aware scenarios to examine how prior knowledge of activity existence influences the assessment of structural similarity. The framework also integrates a compliance checking mechanism that localizes deviations at the activity level and an entropy-regularized node distance aggregation function that quantifies global deviations across the model. Experiments on nine publicly available event logs show that the approach provides a reliable embedding-based conformance indicator that reflects the behavior of fitness and precision. Experiments on synthetic logs with controlled noise levels confirm that it is substantially more robust to log deviations than traditional conformance metrics, PetriNet2Vec, and its dynamic-window and Procrustes-aligned variants, while remaining sensitive to process model degradation. All implementation details and datasets are publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17702